ABSTRACT
These texts, most centrally Celebrity Skin and Celebrity Sleuth, are well worth examining more closely, not so much because they have a broad popularity (although the existence of several imitative magazines and countless related websites, as well as celebrity nude sections in more typical skin magazines, would attest to this) but because, in their seeming illicitness, they manage to illuminate some highly significant underlying principles of more mainstream star culture. Of course, it is hardly a revelation that lurid information about stars piques our interest. This fact is readily evident from the profusion of star-scandal tabloids (e.g. the National EnqUirer) in supermarket checkout aisles, as well as from the emphasis on personal details of stars' lives in more mainstream publications such as People magazine and its imitators (on the rise since the 1970s) and in 'infotainment' television programmes such as Entertainment Tonight. Even 'hard news' outlets such as CNN regularly carry items on the most prominent star and celebrity scandals or gossip. I will be making the case here, however, that in the distinctive form of their discourse and, most crucially, their unique emphasis on the bodies of the famous, the relatively marginalized celebrity nude magazines provide a significant means of understanding the basic nature of our fascination with celebrities. These texts also bear examination in relation to the more specific phenomenon of 'trash cinema'. I will argue that celebrity nude monthlies and trash cinema are linked in a number of important ways, both of them existing at the disreputable periphery of Hollywood spectatorship, but paradoxically also pointing to the very centre of that spectatorship, illustrative of the fundamental dynamics of cinematic pleasure.
